Micah Loewinger: On Friday, the Supreme Court said yes to the TikTok ban.

David Cole: This is essentially a case that pits free speech rights both of TikTok and of the 170 million Americans who use it against the government's national security concerns.

Micah Loewinger: From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger. On this week's show, American TikTokers are hoping for a last minute reprieve ahead of the ban on Sunday. Maybe they need the app more than the app needs them.

Ryan Broderick: When TikTok was banned in India in 2020, there were 200 million Indian users on there, almost double the amount of Americans on there. This is not their first rodeo.

Micah Loewinger: Plus, a tried and true antidote to the shock of seeing Los Angeles in flames.

Female Speaker: Memory is the ability to see change, is equipment for addressing the crises of our times. If you are completely surprised, then essentially you'll have no equipment for understanding, no context.

Micah Loewinger: It's all coming up after this.

Brooke Gladstone: From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger. Just as I sat down to record this introduction on Friday, there was breaking news.

Reporter: This decision is just in from the Supreme Court, the court upholding the federal law that bans TikTok in just two days.

Micah Loewinger: Earlier this week, two presidents, the outgoing one and the incoming one, released dueling promises to save the app.

Reporter: The Biden administration is considering ways to keep TikTok available in the US even if this ban proceeds.

Reporter: President Elect Trump, who takes office Monday is reportedly considering an executive order that would give TikTok's owner up to 90 more days to find a buyer.

Micah Loewinger: That's odd. Wasn't it Biden who signed the TikTok ban into law in April? Wasn't it Trump who first tried to boot the app back in July 2020?

Reporter: President Trump is moving forward with his pledge to ban the video app TikTok. In an executive order issued last night, the president--

Micah Loewinger: Why is Trump now presenting himself as TikTok savior? Maybe he thinks it's good politics. Support for the TikTok ban has dropped from 50% in spring 2023 to 32% this past summer, according to Pew. That and the app served him well during the campaign, helping him reach millions of young voters, or maybe it has something to do with a certain ultra wealthy benefactor, billionaire trader Jeff Yass, co-founder of an investment group called Susquehanna, which has a big stake in TikTok's parent company, ByteDance.

For years, Yass was a vocal never Trumper, then a few things happened. Candidate Trump and Yass met and spoke at a mega donor event in the spring of last year. Shortly after that, Trump announced he had changed his mind about TikTok. Later that month, Jeff Yass penned an op ed in the Wall Street Journal announcing he'd changed his mind about Trump.

Reporter: Mr. President, you met recently with Jeff Yass, who's a hedge fund manager, has a stake in TikTok. He's a huge GOP donor.

Micah Loewinger: CNBC's Squawk Box last March.

Reporter: Steve Bannon has suggested that you've been paid off to switch your view. How did your view change? How did that come about? Did you have a conversation with Jeff Yass about it?

Donald Trump: No, I didn't. I met with him very briefly. I made a speech and I said hello to him and his wife was lovely. It was a meeting that lasted for a few minutes. I don't think I ever met him before, but he never mentioned TikTok.

Micah Loewinger: Ah, okay, that settles it. Look, it's okay to change your mind. Democrats have done it too.

Senator Chuck Schumer: The law passed last year was intended to sever TikTok from the influence of the CCP while keeping the app available for Americans.

Micah Loewinger: New York Senator Chuck Schumer on Thursday.

Senator Chuck Schumer: It's clear that more time is needed to find an American buyer and not disrupt the lives and livelihoods of millions of Americans of so many influencers who have built up a good network of followers.

Reporter: Meanwhile, Senator Ed Markey is pushing legislation to give TikTok's parent company more time to sell to an American company.

Senator Ed Markey: In no way should we have TikTok go dark on Sunday.

Micah Loewinger: Schumer and Markey both voted for the TikTok ban back in April, which you might remember was tacked on to the much delayed $95 billion foreign aid package. The TikTok ban, aka the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications act, was sponsored by now former representative Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin, who has not changed his mind on TikTok. Here he is on Fox News in November 2023 talking about his op ed for the Free Press titled Why Do Young Americans Support Hamas? Look at TikTok.

Mike Gallagher: Increasingly, young Americans get their news from this app. This is controlled by a Chinese company that is at the behest of the Chinese Communist Party. If you don't think the Chinese Communist Party could or would weaponize the that platform to spread anti American propaganda to divide--

Micah Loewinger: If Gallagher has his way, then the US will join several other countries that have shut out the app. A list that includes Afghanistan, India, Iran, and North Korea. David Cole is a professor of law and public policy at Georgetown University and the former National Legal Director of the American Civil Liberties Union. I asked him if there was evidence for the government's case that TikTok had given user data to the Chinese government or served up propaganda to Americans on the app.

David Cole: The United States offers no evidence that that has ever happened. The United States says, "Yes, China has done similar things outside of this country. China has stolen personal data from other sites in the United States, and so the risk is just too great, even though it's never transpired."

Micah Loewinger: Yes, I believe they referenced China's hack of financial data belonging to 147 million people who had their information with a credit card reporting company.

David Cole: No question that China is a bad actor with respect to trying to mine our data. In that sense, it's not speculative. If China had the authority to do this and it was not illegal, it is notable that that never happened in the history of TikTok.

Micah Loewinger: You say that the case, "Pits the speech interests of half the country's citizens and a major US Media outlet against the national security concerns of Congress and the executive branch." Media outlet is an interesting way of describing TikTok. Was that part of the company's defense or is that just your characterization?

David Cole: That's my characterization. Look, TikTok is asserting its own First Amendment rights to select and share information with its users in the way that it deems best, just as X does, just as Facebook does, just as Instagram and YouTube do. It's a US corporation, like all of those. Is that part of the media infrastructure in the United States? Absolutely. A very large percentage of Americans, and especially younger Americans get their news from TikTok. Yes, it's absolutely a media outlet. It should be very disturbing that the United States government is coming in and saying, because we're concerned about the points of view that might be expressed on this media outlet, we get to control who owns that outlet.

Yes, they're doing it only with respect to an organization that has some foreign connection. What would that mean about the Guardian, the British based newspaper? What would that mean about BBC? What would that mean about Politico, which is owned by a German corporation? Could Donald Trump come in and say, "Politico has been really hard on my appointments and my nominations, so I'm going to demand that the German company that owns them sell it?" I think we would all recognize that that's deeply disturbing.

Micah Loewinger: In oral arguments before the Supreme Court last week, it seemed like the justices mostly bought the data collection argument. They were a bit more skeptical of this content manipulation argument. Even for the liberal justices, it seemed like the fact that the law is aimed at getting ByteDance to sell TikTok meant that free speech wasn't necessarily an issue here.

Elena Kagan: It seems to me that your stronger argument, or at least the one that most interested me, was this argument of, look, if the government is doing something specifically for the purpose of changing the content that people see, that has to be subject to strict scrutiny. I don't see that as affecting TikTok.

Micah Loewinger: What did Justice Kagan mean when she said strict scrutiny? Why is that important?

David Cole: The first question in this case is, is the TikTok law a content neutral regulation of TikTok that just happens to affect speech, or is it directed at TikTok's content and therefore a content based law that requires strict scrutiny, the most demanding standard of review that constitutional law recognizes? Most of the time strict scrutiny is fatal because government has to show not only that it has a compelling interest, but also that this law is the most narrowly tailored way to further that interest.

Micah Loewinger: I want to return to the First Amendment questions in a bit, but just on the question of data collection practices. A counter argument that we've heard from critics of the ban is that American tech companies also collect this type of data and they sell it to data brokers, and then foreign adversaries, I guess China included, could buy American data collected legally in the United States. Justice Sotomayor, however, didn't seem to buy the argument that TikTok is doing what its competitors, such as Google are doing.

Justice Sotomayor: How many of these sites have all of the data collection mechanisms that TikTok has? From what I understand from the briefs, not only is it getting your information, it's asking, and most people give it permission to access your contact list, whether that contact list has permitted them to or not. There's a whole lot of data stuff that was discussed in the brief that I don't think any other website gathers.

David Cole: Many apps ask whether they can get access to all of your contacts. That really wasn't what the government argued. If our concern is with data privacy, which is surely a compelling interest, is shutting down TikTok the most narrowly tailored way to protect that interest? What about passing a law that says it's illegal for TikTok to share that information with China or with any other foreign country? Congress didn't even consider that option, and it would allow the 170 million Americans to continue to use TikTok and would protect people's privacy.

Micah Loewinger: What's the precedent for a case like this that the court might be considering?

David Cole: This is essentially a case that pits free speech rights, both of TikTok and of the 170 million Americans who use it, against the government's national security concerns. We've had a lot of those over the course of our history. The McCarthy era was shot through with cases in which the court was asked, do the First Amendment rights of Americans to join the Communist Party, to read communist literature, to espouse communist ideas win out over the government's national security concern that the Communist Party is connected to the Soviet Union and an effort to overthrow the United States by force and violence?

Micah Loewinger: You write that initially the Supreme Court did little to slow, much less halt, this campaign of political repression. In hindsight, however, the court recognized that it had been too deferential to the government's national security assertions. How did it react?

David Cole: It developed a whole host of First Amendment doctrines that are very protective of both speech and association, including, for example, you cannot punish someone for being associated with the Communist Party or any other organization unless you can show that that person joined for the specific purpose of furthering some illegal end of the group. They did so only after Joe McCarthy had been censored by the Senate and the tide had essentially turned against the McCarthy anti communist campaign.

Micah Loewinger: You pointed to the famous Pentagon papers case in 1971 where the court voted 6-3 to deny the government's effort to block the publication of the Pentagon Papers, which it wanted to do, citing claims that it posed a threat to national security.

David Cole: Right. This is the other side of the coin with respect to precedent. The Pentagon Papers case was very much a case pitting free speech rights of a media outlet and its readers against the national security assertions of the federal government. In that case, the court said, "No, you can't block the publication of the Pentagon Papers, even though the government came in and said it will undermine our national security, undermine our efforts in a war." That decision is seen as one of the high points in the court's 200 plus year history.

Micah Loewinger: Another case that I've seen cited in this conversation came from journalist Mike Masnick, who wrote about the TikTok ban back in March for Techdirt. He referred to the 1965 Supreme Court case called Lamont v. Postmaster General, in which, "The government sought to restrict the delivery of communist political propaganda from outside the country. The court struck down the restriction on First Amendment grounds, stating that it was a limitation on the unfettered exercise of the recipients' First Amendment rights." In other words, the court ruled that Americans had a right to access foreign propaganda.

David Cole: Absolutely. That's a critical case in the TikTok argument because it establishes that we Americans have a right to hear ideas, even if those ideas come from a speaker that doesn't itself have First Amendment rights. A foreign government that was an adversary. Nonetheless, the court said, no, Americans have a First Amendment right to get access to those ideas.

Micah Loewinger: What do you say to the argument that the free speech rights of TikTok users are not truly in jeopardy because they can just go and use another app? It's not like they can't post what they think and feel over on YouTube or Instagram.

David Cole: I think there's a reason that TikTok is as popular as it is. It does something different, evidently from other platforms and that's why it has so many users. Yes, there are alternatives, but that has never been a justification for allowing the government to shut down one avenue of speech. We don't say, well, because the Washington Post exists, it would be okay for the government to shut down the New York Times.

I think what people don't necessarily fully appreciate is how dangerous the precedent would be if the Supreme Court allows this to happen. It's not just TikTok's future that is at stake. It's the future of free expression in this country and the future of the principle that the terms of our debate are to be determined by us, the people, and not by the government itself.

Micah Loewinger: David, thank you very much.

David Cole: Thanks.

Micah Loewinger: David Cole is a professor in law and public policy at Georgetown University. His latest piece for the New York Review of Books is titled Free Speech for TikTok.

Brooke Gladstone: Coming up, the so called TikTok refugees are brushing up on their Mandarin.

Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media.

Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger.

Reporter: With that, the TikTok era comes to an end.

Micah Loewinger: If you've scrolled on TikTok at all this past week, you've seen the farewells to an app that whether you love it or hate it or never downloaded it, has undeniably transformed our politics and culture.

Male Speaker: Look, I know there's a lot of bad stuff on this app, but I really am going to miss it.

Micah Loewinger: For years now, it's been one of the Internet's top search engines, especially for Gen Z. In 2023, according to a study commissioned by the company, TikTok contributed $24.2 billion to the US GDP.

Male Speaker: It's just an app, but it's our whole life now.

Male Speaker: We've worked seven days a week, 80 hour weeks for 5 years to build this up.

Micah Loewinger: A new generation of personalities found micro and mega fame on the app. Not just influencers. Authors, musicians, journalists, actors, comedy writers, small business owners. Just about every remaining gatekeeper in America was leapfrogged at one point or another by TikTok's powerful algorithm. Yes, like other social media sites, it was home to viral misinformation. It gobbled up our personal data on a massive scale and kept some of us glued to our screens for a probably unhealthy amount of time each day. Many of TikTok's users this week have been mocking the government's rationales for killing it.

Female Speaker: I just have a quick message for my personal Chinese spy who's been spying on me through this app for five years. I just wanted to say Xie xie zai Jian.

Micah Loewinger: Accounts big and small have been frantically directing their audiences to follow them out into the social media wilderness.

Male Speaker: Hi, everybody. Goodbye. This is my last TikTok. Here are the following links if you wish to find me. I made a blue sky. Right here's my Instagram, the Man--

Female Speaker: I will be uploading on YouTube and I will be finally launching my podcast. Bye, TikTok.

Micah Loewinger: Tech journalist Ryan Broderick has been tracking the great TikToker migration and what it tells us about the future of the Internet for his newsletter, Garbage Day. Ryan, welcome to On the Media.

Ryan Broderick: Thank you for having me. Happy to be here.

Micah Loewinger: You recently wrote that, "Americans still don't realize what TikTok is." When you say Americans, you mean users, the people who use TikTok, but also politicians and the Supreme Court justices. You pointed to an exchange between Amy Coney Barrett and TikTok's legal team from last Friday as proof of this.

Amy Coney Barrett: Am I right that the algorithm is the speech here?

TikTok's Advocate: Yes, Your Honor. I would say the algorithm is a lot of things, the algorithm has built within it, it's basically how we predict what our customers want to see.

Amy Coney Barrett: The editorial discretion.

TikTok's Advocate: Yes, the editorial discretion. It also has built within it the moderation elements.

Ryan Broderick: You see these very funny exchanges where the Supreme Court is saying, "What is being violated here? Where is the free speech? Is it in the algorithm? Is it in the hashtags? What is this?" To me, it just seemed so indicative of a large scale misunderstanding of not just on our end of what TikTok is, but also TikTok's refusal to admit what they are as well.

Micah Loewinger: You say American lawmakers think that TikTok is a social platform. I know from spending time on TikTok that TikTok's users also think that it is a social platform. Why is it not that?

Ryan Broderick: There are social elements to it, of course, but TikTok is the sister app of ByteDance's other app, which is called Douyin, which can only be used inside China. Douyin, like most Chinese social networks, are primarily social shopping apps. They make their money from live streams with influencers hawking products which you can then buy directly through the app. TikTok, when it launched outside of China, was always a long play to bring social shopping to the rest of the world. You can see this with the introduction of TikTok shop, which happened a few years ago.

All of the ways that the app surfaces content can be used for finding social content, but they were built to sell you products. You'll hear users say the algorithm feels different than Instagram or YouTube or whatever. That's why, it's because it's literally built for something very different. We in the US have never really acknowledged that or understood it or cared about that. We've used it inadvertently for other things. That's what TikTok is here for. It's a long play of trying to make Chinese style social shopping big in the West.

Micah Loewinger: When you say social shopping, you're referring to what is more common in China and other countries where like everything apps where you could communicate and buy your groceries and et cetera, et cetera. That's not something Americans are that exposed to currently.

Ryan Broderick: Honestly, imagine if TikTok was owned by Amazon. That's what all these apps are making a play for. You have what look like social networks that have E-commerce inside of them, but then you also have E-commerce apps that have social content inside of them. To try to keep up, like Amazon has even tried to add more social features. There's a short form video feed inside of Amazon now. That's the way that a lot of these Chinese apps have been evolving, which is towards you're looking at social content in between buying things. That's the idea.

Micah Loewinger: I think that's an interesting distinction. I'm not sure I understand what bearing it has on the legal arguments for and against banning TikTok. Nor do I see its relevance to the meaningfulness to its user base.

Ryan Broderick: A lot of the conversation around the ban in the US particularly from lawmakers, but also in the media, is this idea that TikTok will have to cave and they'll have to sell in the US because the US audience is so valuable. The point that I was trying to make is that it's not because we are just one step towards a global E-commerce network. Now, are we massive and are we very influential? Absolutely. The idea that our goofy videos are so valuable to TikTok that they would sell, to me feels laughable.

Micah Loewinger: The way that Mike Gallagher, the lawmaker who sponsored what we call the TikTok ban, the way he puts it is China is engaged in a smokeless battlefield of the Internet and that TikTok represents a form of soft power over Americans.

Ryan Broderick: I think that ByteDance via TikTok is probably doing some version of what Meta with Facebook has done to the rest of the world. I do think that at this point we can say that there are radicalizing effects of social networks or social like networks that have political consequences. Do I believe that it is as simple as we want this political outcome, so we're going to show people that content and that political outcome happens. The research doesn't back that up.

I do think the way that people experience content online and the algorithms that push it towards us do create political effects because TikTok is so interested in hyper targeting your interests, no two feeds are alike. Your TikTok feed and my TikTok feed, never two shall meet. A lot of the impact of that has been on building small, weird subcultures or fandoms or communities. You also have a lot of marginalized communities saying that on TikTok they feel very comfortable where if they go to Instagram per se, they feel like very antagonized or attacked or whatever. That does have an effect on political speech.

As we saw at the end of 2023 when Israel invades Palestine and the youth of America on TikTok are talking about it in this way that people are saying is anti Semitic or whatever it is. If you look into it, it's teenagers reacting to the conflict in a way that didn't feel moderated by mainstream media or whatever. They felt like they could just have these conversations amongst themselves. There is a political effect due to algorithmic incentives and what it's showing you. I don't think it's as simple as-- Look, if the Chinese government has created a brainwashing algorithm, they're way ahead of us, we might as well give up because this stuff is way more complicated than I think our lawmakers believe it to be.

Micah Loewinger: To be clear, we still don't have evidence that China is, say, flicking a switch to make American teens more pro Palestinian than for Israel.

Ryan Broderick: We don't. We have evidence that TikTok has been used to spy on American journalists. We have evidence that ByteDance employees in mainland China have moderated content outside of China on the app. We do have evidence that Chinese values politically have been baked into certain decisions around hashtags. In the same way, I'm sure any country would say that American values are baked into Facebook. I have not seen any proof that any tech company on earth knows exactly how those things will play out until they do play out.

Micah Loewinger: On January 19th. On Sunday, we may see TikTok shut off, the service banned permanently, temporarily. We just at time of recording on Thursday, January 16th. We just don't know. As many TikTok users prepare for that eventuality, as you mentioned, many are lamenting the feeling that there isn't a clear replacement for TikTok. Here's one viral video from a guy who goes by Etymology Nerd.

Adam Aleksic: TikTok is fundamentally different from Instagram or YouTube because the user interface is meant to encourage participatory discussion across broad groups of people. I post videos across all three apps, and TikTok is the only one where I regularly see people responding to my videos with their videos. The other apps just don't have that infrastructure, so those conversations don't happen.

Micah Loewinger: There was one viral TikTok that illustrated this frustration with Instagram as well.

emale Speaker: I am really sorry to all the influencers and content creators begging us to follow them on Instagram, but me following you on Instagram is not going to help because I'm going to be fed your content. Here's a screen recording of my current Instagram feed. Starts with an ad. Then it'll push me magazines. It pushes Vogue, a brand I don't follow. Finally, something I'm interested in. Sponsorship, suggested account I don't follow. Finally, a friend of mine.

Micah Loewinger: All of which speaks to this feeling that millions, upwards of 170 million TikTok users are being set loose into an Internet landscape that can't replace it. In the wake of the Supreme Court's hearing on whether to let the US ban TikTok, some users this week started migrating over to another Chinese social media app called Xiaohongshu, also known as RedNote. Tell me about this new app that's just entered the mix.

Ryan Broderick: The first important thing here is that RedNote, at least right now, does not require a Chinese phone number to set up an account. That's different than say Weibo or WeChat, which are a little more complicated for a non Chinese citizen to use and set up. RedNote is all in Mandarin, but the UI is pretty simple, so you can wrap your head around it. RedNote has been passed around on TikTok for a while. I found a couple small Black TikTok creators who were talking about it, and one of them in particular was saying that she had heard about RedNote from other Black women on TikTok.

Female Speaker: I heard about RedNote a couple of weeks ago because all the Black girlies we're on here talking about how cute it was over there and it is indeed cutest over there. It is all in Mandarin, I will say that, though.

Ryan Broderick: It would be closest to probably China's Instagram or China's Pinterest, but it has a lot of social shopping features added into it. It's full of beauty brands doing live stream demos of their products which you can buy inside of it. I've compared it to QVC, it's aggressively monetized social network, but it has TikTok experiences. The users there are finding it similar enough to TikTok that they can have the same localized, raw, seemingly unfiltered, but filtered experience that they would get on TikTok. It's also just a massive meme and troll at this point because young Americans are so angry about the ban that they're doing anything in their power to piss off US lawmakers and especially make sure that people at Meta know that their products are awful and they would never go to Instagram.

Female Speaker: They lobbied with millions and millions of dollars to get this out banned and they want us to just hop on over there, no.

Ryan Broderick: It's a multi level troll happening right now. There is a experience that is similar between RedNote and TikTok.

Micah Loewinger: The app's name in Chinese translates to Little Red book, which, of course, sounds like a reference to the famous collection of speeches by Mao Zedong--

Ryan Broderick: But it is not.

Micah Loewinger: Yes.

Ryan Broderick: It's much funnier. Apparently when you graduate Stanford University, they give you a little red book.

Micah Loewinger: The guy who founded RedNote, his name is also Mao, but according to the Washington Post, he was inspired by red, which is the color of Stanford Business School. I guess also a color that's associated with Bain & Company, the consulting firm or something.

Ryan Broderick: That rules. That's so good. I didn't know that part. That's so funny. This was the punchline that I hit in my piece on this as well, which is that TikTok is so much more capitalistic than any social network that we have in the US because it is literally trying to get you to buy a bunch of junk all day long. Because we deemed it too communist or too socialist or too nefariously tied to the Chinese government, we have pushed people to an even more upper class, capitalistic Chinese social network that is trying to sell you even more junk. I just think the irony is too funny there.

Micah Loewinger: The people calling themselves TikTok refugees who are going to RedNote looking for some analogous experience, how are they fitting in so far?

Ryan Broderick: A lot of it's been very cute.

Female Speaker: Hello, friends from TikTok. Welcome to Xiaohongshu. I'm shocked when I open this application tonight because I can imagine that it will be an international place.

Male Speaker: Hey, friends from TikTok, I am Abe from China and I just want to say it's so amazing to have you here. For so long, we haven't really been able to connect or talk to each other like this, but now we finally can, and it feels so special.

Ryan Broderick: I've seen a lot of jokes about McDonald's and how fat we are. I've seen a lot of Americans asking what different Chinese emojis mean. I've seen a lot of Americans just being shocked that Chinese cities are beautiful. There's a lot of trading of nationalistic propaganda going on in a way that's cute. I've also just seen a lot of Chinese and American young people realizing that they have a lot in common and a lot to talk about. I think that that's honestly really important.

Now, things are more recently getting a little darker because China does have nationalist trolls the way we do, and they're getting a little angry about all the Americans at RedNote. I'm also seeing American, Trump supporters going in and fighting with them. I also saw this thing where Americans were teaching the Chinese users how to 3D print guns. Anything on the Internet, it's going to spin out of control.

Right now, we're in this moment where Chinese regulators haven't put down any ruling or any decision on what's going to happen here. RedNote is already looking into walling off Chinese RedNote from the rest of the world and hiring US moderators. I think it's just a fun cultural curiosity right now that this is happening. I don't think this is the rise of the next TikTok.

Micah Loewinger: Do you think that the effort by American lawmakers to stem the influence of Chinese tech on the US Will be successful?

Ryan Broderick: In the short term, probably. In the long term, I'm less clear. Obviously, there's a political aspect to the panic about Chinese soft power, but I think that it is also revealing a deep insecurity about America's own technological thumbprint on the world. Chinese developers have figured out new and different, very novel ways of using the Internet. People like them, people do like them. That is not a conspiracy theory. I don't think passing these regulations, ones that I should point out, have profound implications for how the First Amendment works in America. I don't think that is a great way to deal with this waning influence and this insecurity that America has right now about its tech offerings.

Micah Loewinger: Ryan, thank you very much.

Ryan Broderick: Thank you for having me. I'll see you on RedNote.

Micah Loewinger: I'm there. I heard that for security reasons, you're not downloading it. It's got me second guessing my decision to just plop it on my phone.

Ryan Broderick: No, I did not download it because I did see a developer able to find a backdoor in it pretty quickly. I don't know what that backdoor goes to or means, so I'm not going to do that.

Micah Loewinger: You can't find Ryan Broderick on RedNote, but you can find him through his newsletter, Garbage Day. Ryan, thanks so much.

Ryan Broderick: Thanks for having me.

[music]

Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger.

Brooke Gladstone: I'm Brooke Gladstone. As I read this, at least 27 people have died in the LA fires and 12,000 structures destroyed. Heavy smoke continues to blanket the region. Further polluting the zone is a toxic haze of conspiracies and lies erupting online. This from TikTok.

Male Speaker: Someone on Facebook posted this video of what they said was a laser starting a fire in LA.

Female Speaker: Can someone explain to me why we have trees with green leaves on them, streets and streets, but yet all of these homes are destroyed, disintegrated, down to literally nothing but the trees down the entire street, totally okay.

Male Speaker: What if certain locations are being cleared for new high tech developments or secret projects? Could this be a modern land grab disguised as a natural disaster?

Brooke Gladstone: Meanwhile, conservative media is applying Maga's all purpose obsession to chaos on the ground.

Reporter: LA's fire chief has made not filling the fire hydrants top priority, but diversity.

Brooke Gladstone: In legacy media, coverage of the tragedy is marked by apolitical shock and awe and the recurrence of a single word.

Female Speaker: It's been unprecedented what we've seen.

Female Speaker: The fire is just moving through these suburbs at extremely fast rates. That is pretty unprecedented.

Male Speaker: This has been an absolutely unprecedented event for the LA County Fire Department.

Brooke Gladstone: Rebecca Solnit is the author of many books, including A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster. In a recent Guardian column, she said that as a California native, she found it shocking, of course, but not particularly surprising.

Rebecca Solnit: They're very precedented, a word we should maybe use more. In the Paradise fire in 2018, an entire town of 18,000 structures burned, which is a higher count of structures and a greater loss of life than we've seen in LA to date. LA itself has had fires less destructive of structures, but more destructive in terms of acres than we've seen yet. The biggest fire in California to date, which was quite recent, burned more than a million acres.

The LA region, particularly Malibu, is a place where fire is just an inherent part of the ecology. I was bothered both by people suggesting nothing like this had happened when the last catastrophic fire in Malibu had been in December.

Brooke Gladstone: You mentioned it was only a month ago that, I don't know, 4,000 acres burned around Malibu in just two days?

Reporter: Thousands were ordered to evacuate, Kurt Camm stayed behind.

Kurt Camm: All these things were swirling down and there's just sparks and embers blowing everywhere and you think the world's coming to an end.

Brooke Gladstone: That reminded you of the essay that the LA writer Mike Davis wrote back in 1998. He said that the case for letting Malibu burn is that it is inevitably going to burn.

Rebecca Solnit: The more you suppress fire, the more the fuel load builds up and so the fire burns hotter. That's a problem all over California. The National Park Service, the Forest Service, et cetera, really were founded on east coast and European ideas that fire was some violent, unwelcome intruder in the natural world. We got Smokey the Bear and all kinds of other stuff.

Male Speaker: "That's a good job," said Smokey the Bear.

Smokey the Bear: Only you can prevent forest fires.

Rebecca Solnit: Actually, fire is a healthy and natural part of the ecology, for the most part. You can never point to climate entirely responsible, but it's definitely augmenting drought and lots of other conditions that make these fires far more intense.

Brooke Gladstone: When it comes to any preparation, you said something that really struck me. You wrote, "Catastrophic fire erases what was there before, so does forgetting. Memory is a resource for facing the future, and that forgetting creates terrible vulnerabilities."

Rebecca Solnit: I actually went back and reread a piece John McPhee published in the New Yorker in 1988 about the very steep, very young LA mountains prone to catastrophic debris slides in which rain or other conditions loosen up boulders that can take out whole neighborhoods in these avalanches. One of the things he wrote about is that developers would build in these places that were very prone to them. The debris avalanches would wipe them out. The developers would rebuild, and people who weren't there for the last one would move in.

There's a baseline that comes from being in a place for a long time. You learn from history about what can happen, what has happened, what will happen again. That's why I say memory is a superpower. If you remember, you have a context, you can give it meaning, you can understand why something happens. If you are completely surprised, not just shocked, then essentially you'll have no context, no equipment for understanding.

Brooke Gladstone: What about the narratives around who is really to blame? Is forgetting feeding some of that?

Rebecca Solnit: There's a way people want simple comic book villains. Really, if you want to point fingers, I think the main entity to point at is the people, the institutions, the corporations that decided to prevent us from taking action on climate change. That is first and foremost the fossil fuel industry. Their names are on these fires. They've known for decades that catastrophic climate change was coming, that it would mean loss of life, loss of property. They decided to go for it. They decided to place quarterly earnings over the fate of the Earth for thousands of years to come.

Individual climate catastrophes are all related to their decision to do this. The governments and institutions that decided to deny, delay and drag their feet on climate action. People often think, "Oh, it's too late, there's nothing we can do. We don't know what to do." None of that is true. We just have a bunch of people stopping us from doing it, including the incoming administration.

Brooke Gladstone: That reminds me, Chris Wright, Trump's candidate to lead the Energy Department, says that it's ridiculous to blame anything to do with the California fires on climate change. In fact, the square footage of burned lands has declined.

Rebecca Solnit: There's a right wing idea of radical individualism of this as being why climate change is not just inconvenient to them, but almost offensive. Because the most basic principle of climate is that everything is connected to everything else. The stuff we burn puts greenhouse gases in the sky, which further insulate the earth, which heats it up, which wrecks the weather and unleashes chaos. That connects very directly to something else crucial to Trumpism in this country and authoritarianism in general, which is that if you want absolute power and control, other systems of truth pose a threat to you. That includes science, history, and memory.

Brooke Gladstone: Another narrative that has popped up is that of looters descending on LA. This is familiar to you as a student of natural disasters?

Rebecca Solnit: Yes, and looting is a minor problem when people are dying and entire neighborhoods are burning down, that's clearly not the biggest problem. It relates very well to how law enforcement sees the world and how conservatives, who tend to value private property over human life, tend to see the world. The media is so often a sucker for these narratives.

Reporter: This is the moment looters enter an evacuated home in the Palisades. They were later arrested and charged with stealing $200,000 worth of property.

Reporter: High alert for looters out here. The National Guard has been brought in to bolster security and some people have gone back home to try to defend what they have left.

Rebecca Solnit: Obviously it does happen, but what we actually see in disaster is that most people are altruistic, resourceful, creative and deeply empathic. They take care of each other. They improvise rescues.

Brooke Gladstone: Here's some tape of that very thing in California.

Reporter: Two of the only houses still standing on his block are homes Felipe Carrillo says he personally saved with his garden hose.

Felipe Carrillo: I caught on fire a couple of times.

Reporter: You caught on fire?

Felipe Carrillo: Yes.

Reporter: An Altadena man is being called a hero tonight for saving eight neighbors' homes.

Felipe Carrillo: Then I went over to here to George's house, my neighbor George, and the side of his house there was on fire. Then I went to Eleanor over here. Her backyard was on fire.

Reporter: Donation centers like this one at the Santa Anita racetrack flooded with much needed supplies and volunteers eager to help.

Rebecca Solnit: There's all kinds of supply hubs, mutual aid, people offering hauling services, water stations, community kitchens. The most poetically perfect one, I think, is the writer Octavia Butler wrote about catastrophic Los Angeles in the year 2025, and she is from El Tedeno, where a bookstore named Octavia's Bookshelf exists. They were so nimble and pivoted immediately to become a supply hub. They put all their books in the attic and turned all their bookshelves into essentials that people who had to evacuate or lost their homes needed. Lots of volunteers to help them staff it. Lots of donors came to help them supply it. It's pretty magical that something named after Octavia Butler is actually now helping people meet what you could call Octavia Butler conditions.

Brooke Gladstone: You found that mid crisis community building can produce actually lasting change.

Rebecca Solnit: The most amazing example of that for me, in a way, is Dorothy Day, the social activist and religious mystic, the co-founder of Catholic Worker, who was a child in Oakland when the 1906 earthquake hit the San Francisco Bay area. She had this epiphany that while the disaster lasted, people loved each other. Her whole life was trying to figure out, how do you create permanent circumstances that generosity and solidarity can happen? Because these things are often fleeting. They dry up as life goes back to normal.

That's what A Paradise Built in Hell is about, is the disaster is hell, but the paradise is these communities that people create in response to them. The question I was left with at the end of the book is what kinds of discipline, what kinds of memory, what kinds of storytelling? Let us build more of that, value more of that.

Brooke Gladstone: In fact, you wrote that every crisis is in part a storytelling crisis, that we're hemmed in by stories that prevent us from seeing or believing in or acting on the possibilities for change. You point to one that was refuted by a 2022 study in the science journal Nature. It found that most Americans believe that only a minority support climate action, when in fact a large majority does. What's the impact of that?

Rebecca Solnit: I think the media has not done a very good job of showing how much support there is for the governmental action and the financial expenditure to address the climate crisis. The belief that, "Oh, we're a lonely minority of people," feeds into this sense of powerlessness and defeatism around climate action. It's a destructive story that also happens to not be a true story.

Brooke Gladstone: When I was reading one of your pieces in the Guardian from a couple of years back, you wrote about taking a group of people to Terminator 2. There's a narrative in there, and in all Hollywood action films, it's essential that you say should not be applied to the real world. That's the narrative about exceptional people, heroes doing the really important work.

Rebecca Solnit: Here's the tricky thing. I love Terminator 2 particularly because it gives us the message in a lot of different ways that the future is something we make in the present. In that sense, it's very empowering. The not so helpful thing, like almost every Hollywood movie, is we get a tiny minority of superheroes whose superpowers are basically the capacity to inflict and endure extreme violence. What we see with something like the LA fires is that the heroes are people who don't need to have really big muscles and don't need to engage in violence, who are distributing water, hauling stuff for evacuees, offering shelter, cooking food, listening deeply.

Change doesn't happen overnight. I've seen extraordinary campaigns happen over 5, 10, 20 years. I saw the Keystone XL pipeline get stopped over a 10 or 12 year campaign. I've seen the climate movement grow and win thousands of victories over the course of this century. This is part of why I talk about memory as a superpower, to go back where we began. Memory is the ability to see change. The ability to see change is equipment for addressing the crises of our times. The meaning, the context, is the memory. That's what we need to understand the world and act in it.

Brooke Gladstone: Thank you very much, Rebecca.

Rebecca Solnit: You're welcome.

Brooke Gladstone: Rebecca Solnit is the author of many books, including A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster. She also launched the climate project Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility.

Micah Loewinger: That's it for this week's show. On the Media is produced by Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark-Callender, Candice Wong and Katarina Barton.

Brooke Gladstone: Our technical director is Jennifer Munson. Our engineer is Brendan Dalton. Eloise Blondio is our senior producer. Our executive producer is Katya Rogers. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger.

 

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